More Than Just Surviving: Rebellion Against Patriarchy in the English Translation of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article analyzes the English translation of the Korean novel The Vegetarian (2015) by Han Kang in light of the impact of a patriarchal society on a woman's life. In the article, I analyze the English version as a standalone novel rather than a translation from Korean due to various instances of mistranslations and omissions. The narrative tells the story of Yeong-hye, a Korean woman who one day becomes an eponymous vegetarian and stops eating meat. The more committed Yeong-hye is to her dietary choice, the more aggressive her family becomes, perceiving her decision as absurd and foolish. The novel's central theme, unlike the novel's title may suggest, is not vegetarianism but rebellion and the silent suffering of a woman trapped in a patriarchal world that does not understand her. The study incorporates Gilbert and Gubar's concept of the “angel in the house” and Timothy Morton's distinction between Life and "life." Lastly, the research discusses the role of Yeong-hye and the author of the novel, Han Kang, concerning Gilbert and Gubar's notion of “anxiety of authorship”. I argue that Yeong-hye's transformation, resulting in her institutionalization in a mental hospital.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".